A Repository for C. A. Howard's Brain Traffic

Da Luigi, the restaurant in this photo, is not far from the Blue Grotto on Capri. If I had only one afternoon to live, I think I would like to spend it here. Drift on in to the little cove in the boat you've hired for the day, drop anchor, and await the restaurant's launch that will bring you in to the sunbathing area. This is where I like to look around to see if my future wife is in attendance. From there, a chatty Italian waiter will escort you to your table, where you are encouraged to while away the afternoon over delicious food, wine, and plates of olives, prosciutto, and parmigiano.

Saturday, May 13, 2006

One of the cheapest forms of entertainment I've ever come across, besides my weekly Poker Night, is my almost-nightly sequence of unimaginably-detailed, farfetched dreams. The level of detail in these visions is frighteningly vivid (sounds, colors, the spelling of names and places).

Luckily, I no longer suffer from the sorts of nightmares I had as a child. About twice a year, however, I do have to endure a nightmare in which I am the central figure in a deadly combat situation. This started about ten years ago. I found myself commanding a ragtag militia of ten or so American guys, defending the little bit of land left after the United States had been invaded and overrun by China. We found ourselves peeking out of the windows of a beautiful yellow farmhouse in Vermont, situated in the middle of a wide, open green field, covered in pretty flowers. Thick woods bordered this field on all sides, and soon my heart sank, as a swarm of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers rolled like a wave out of the woods, closing in from all sides. I shouted an order to my men to start firing, but when I looked around, I saw that all of them had been killed, and I was alone. As the mass of soldiers closed in on me, the dream faded to black.

Similarly, I found myself a few months ago (around the time I was reading a biography of Pol Pot) on my stomach in a Cambodian jungle, trying to stay quiet as a patrol of Khmer Rouge searched high and low for me and the mother-with-child I was trying to help escape. I saw the Khmer Rouge youngsters in their navy blue tunics and pink scarves all around us. As with all of these dreams, I awoke in a full cold sweat with my heart pounding at my chest.

A few nights ago I had a dream of the more routine, but amusing, variety. In it, I was either participating in, or sneaking along behind, a house tour being given to some couples by a metrosexual, sixty-something male real estate broker along Mulholland Drive above Beverly Hills. We saw some decent homes, and finally one of the couples found one that they desperately wanted to buy.

The real estate broker pulled me aside and said "It's really too bad, since I know that my best client will also like this house, and he takes great pleasure in outbidding unsuspecting buyers."

"Who's this best client?" I asked.

"Oh, it's Ward Lamborghini."

I nodded and pursed my lips, as everyone knew who Ward Lamborghini was: The Wasp/Italian patriarch of the exotic car company who appeared regularly in the society pages. How this character invented himself and invited himself into my dream, I have no idea.

Later in the house tour, some controversy arose when it became clear that the broker was handling the bid on a $20-30 million property for a mysterious foreign client, who turned out to be the brutal, oppressive dictator of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), the African country of 14 million citizens nestled between Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Mali. I don't know where all that came from. I don't even know if the real head of state is a dictator or a democracy-embracing reformer, but in the dream he was an Idi Amin-esque monster with a dismal human rights record. The broker certainly wanted to close the deal, but I think the neighbors were rather non-plussed.